Steven Staples “There is a fightback going on. The defence lobby and the corporate lobby don’t win every time.”
– Steven Staples






Ben Powless and Rosa Kouri “We need to become a carbon neutral society – we don’t claim to know how to get there — but need to start.”
– Ben Powless

INTEGRATE THIS! Challenging the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America

A report by the Council of Canadians

PART III: WHAT WE HEARD

Panel 2: Commandeering the Continent: Military Integration, Big Oil and the Environment

When we convened this panel discussion, we wanted to know how continental integration could impact the environment. Why does the U.S. insist on a North American resource pact within the SPP? How will regulatory harmonization between Canada and the U.S. affect our ability to regulate industry to protect the environment and public health? What do military integration and a common North American foreign policy have to do with prosperity? And why should we be worried about Canada’s water?

This discussion brought together military expert Steven Staples from the Rideau Institute, Diana Gibson, Research Director at the Parkland Institute, Rosa Kouri and Ben Powless from the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, and environmental lawyer and Council of Canadians board member Steven Shrybman.

Steven Staples spoke about how the reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks drew two powerful forces together for the first time – Canada’s corporate elite and the military defence lobby. He picked up on Maureen Webb’s comments from earlier in the day, discussing how “September 11 created a crisis among the business elites in Canada … they thought NAFTA was now in jeopardy.”

According to Staples, many in the business community see Canada’s participation in the U.S. War on Terror as “defending NAFTA,” and that’s why the Canadian Council of Chief Executives advocated so strongly for Canada to join George Bush’s Ballistic Missile Defence program and the war in Iraq.

“There is a fight-back going on,” said Staples. “The defence lobby and the corporate lobby don’t win every time. And the record is mixed. Through popular movements and people going into the streets, we kept Canada out of the war in Iraq. That drove the defence lobby and the corporate lobby nuts … Their next target then was to get Paul Martin to join missile defence, and we stopped them on that front as well.”

Staples pointed out that Canada’s military spending this year has now surpassed the amount of money we spent when the Berlin Wall was still standing.

“It’s a tug of war – we win some, they win some,” he said.

Making the connection between the war industry and its ever-escalating need for fuel, Diana Gibson focused on the way that the SPP will affect Canada’s energy resources.

“Why does the U.S. want our energy?” she asked. “First, as everyone knows, they consume more than they’re producing. They have an energy strategy that does not focus on reducing consumption, but focuses on increasing and securing supply for the future. And Alberta’s tar sands feature quite prominently. The U.S. had also made energy part of their security agreement. Their national security and their energy security are one and the same.”

According to Gibson, since the implementation of the proportional sharing clause in NAFTA – which ensures that Canada can never reduce the proportion of energy that we export to the U.S., even in times of domestic crisis – Canada has become a “resource hinterland for the U.S.”

Gibson sees this as a form of “colonization by stealth,” pointing to the fact that Canada has lost its 25-year supply of oil and gas, and that foreign ownership has skyrocketed in Alberta’s oil patch. “Canada is now exporting more than half of our oil and gas, which we weren’t doing prior to NAFTA and the FTA,” she said.

What’s worse, according to Gibson, is that production has increased dramatically in recent years and is set to go even higher, since the Bush administration expressed a desire for a “fivefold expansion” in the tar sands – a predicted increase from 1 million barrels of oil per day to over 5 million. And Canada has the lowest taxes in the world on oil at only 23 cents per barrel.

Still, Gibson believes that there is sufficient cause for optimism, given that most of Canada’s energy is secure and publicly owned.

“I think we need to look to Northern European countries like Norway … which has solid majority public ownership of their energy. They save all of their energy revenues to invest in their future. They have strong policies around foreign access. And they get 96 per cent royalties off of their energy and the industry is still lined up at the door to get in there. There hasn’t been some sort of capital strike against Norway … Canada is completely out of step with the rest of the world in energy sovereignty.”

Rosa Kouri and Ben Powless stressed the need for Canada to take serious action on climate change, and expressed concern over the disastrous environmental implications associated with increased production in the tar sands.

“We’ve already seen the first impact of climate change on people in Canada,” said Powless. “The Inuit people of the north are victim to thinning ice. The Arctic is already warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet … many species are at risk, including the polar bear. More shockingly, it threatens the lives of the region’s more than 155,000 Inuit, who rely on the ice and all it supports for their traditional way of life.”

According to Powless, Canada needs “Kyoto or bust.”

“Our government needs to seriously restrict greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions [from 1990 levels] by 2050,” he said. “We need to become a carbon neutral society – we don’t claim to know how to get there—but need to start.”

For Kouri, the harmonization of environmental regulations and health safety standards under the Security and Prosperity Partnership raises an alarm.

“While hemispheric standardization would be a good idea if we were all to raise ourselves up to a common standard, generally what happens is that we end up gravitating to somewhere below average, and I would even say to the bottom.” Both Powless and Kouri discussed the concept of a “just transition” to a more environmentally sustainable future, ensuring that the needs of vulnerable communities and of low-income people are taken into consideration.

“We want to make local communities the owners of this transition,” said Kouri. “Under NAFTA and the SPP, Canada can’t give incentives to local organizations to build a wind farm. This reminds us that if the same big companies are profi ting from the transition to a clean air economy, we only continue to perpetuate economic and social injustice.”

Steven Shrybman picked up on Kouri’s theme of social and environmental justice, slamming the Canadian government for its reputation on the world stage: “We are alone in the world in standing up and voting against the recognition of water as a fundamental human right [at the United Nations]. And when you ask these officials at Foreign Affairs and International Trade why, they say with a perfectly straight face, that it’s because [they’re] worried about Canadian sovereignty … it’s just confounding that the government can take that position,” he said.

The irony, of course, is that while the government is claiming to be protecting Canada’s sovereignty over our water internationally, the North American Free Trade Agreement already strips Canada of the ability to set effective environmental standards.

Shrybman discussed how Chapter 11 of NAFTA, which allows corporations to sue governments for loss of profi ts, has affected small communities, particularly in Mexico. He mentioned a recent case where a tiny Mexican community was forced to pay $18 million in reparations to U.S.-based Metalclad, after attempting to ban the company from building a hazardous waste site, even though Metalclad hadn’t bothered to obtain a local permit.

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